Diclofenac, prescribed for gout or arthritis, wends into the poem to explain the thousands of vultures—long- & slender-billed, oriental white-backed & griffin—& owls who carrion-clean what the vultures of northern Indian skies leave on skinned cattle shot full of the drug, & I find myself speaking another poem’s tongue, saying something about rosemary […]
Naked, the Emperor gazes up at the giraffe wavering on crane-legs after days in the dark, waiting. The people, witness, have never seen such a creature, they know […]
If you sleep the night inside someone, her cells,saltwater-stained, fuse with yours like the blood of twins. Apes in Mauritania grow stronger, Galileo tells us, influenced by the sphere of angels. Here, then—thumbnail sketches for zoning changes along the riparian bank of the species boundary, for chimera. Like fiber optics, human nerves […]
Is it the sea we wish? The sleep of the changeless? […]
Tonight walks the rainforest of you, and the ecologist’s English fails the imagination between what’s beginning, just, to sleep, and what’s waking. Some bird is almost a 7-inch country song of carbon repeating ‘til dawn, a turntable in the roots with the orange-kneed tarantula. Old nightmare cleared for palm oil, the clouds fall through a […]
A golden delicious root grazes the pressure-treated sill, the touch of a friend you want to forget. I want a harmony I can hold my part inside, another’s voice steadying the mammalian wiring fray in my brain. Acoustic version and electric version: dawn-cold maples, the nova’d hay by the blossoming elderberry, sine wave […]
Like flash bulb, maybe a firefly, she felt herself flare & then dim, & then waited for the surge of matter she had no means to measure in her gut. Glass ceiling but no visible stars, intimation of leaves. On the workbench, transfigured earth singing, &, though she can’t know this, singing in […]
Not cantata—sonata. Whatever they were, the first birds of spring, the doctor kneaded your breast counterclockwise. Discovering the mass, he needled a bit of blood & core, asked me to push Print— a sonogram I could imagine Beethoven, maddened by syphilis or […]